Awesome Ai

This mind bending experimental short film from Masaki Mizuno and Khaki combines live-action footage, visual effects, and generative AI to place dancer Toyotaka and his doppelgangers in the midst of a morphing city. The way the buildings and environments move, bend, and flex is like Christopher Nolan’s Inception on steroids.

You might not recognize the name Dustin Ballard, but he’s the mad genius behind the musical mayhem channel known as There I Ruined It. In addition to editing musical tracks, he often uses AI to generate bits of the silliness. In this TED Talk, Dustin talks about the downsides and upsides of using AI in the creation of music.

TrekTube asked real artificial intelligence to analyze Star Trek’s Lt. Cmdr. Data and other science fiction AIs in a video voiced in the android’s familiar tone. Guided by human-engineered prompts, the large language model explores what Hollywood gets wrong about AI, whether it could pass The Measure of a Man test, and how real neural networks compare to the Borg.

ChatGPT has gotten quite good at natural language conversations – and can do it in multiple languages. Polyglot Xiaomanyc spoke with the AI in English, Chinese, Spanish, and… Hexadecimal, an alphanumeric language generally used for computer programming. Mr. GPT was impressed, but kept trying to steer things back to human languages.

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute teamed up to showcase improvements in the AI driving the Atlas robot. The Large Behavior Model not only enables the humanoid to walk, crouch, and lift, but adapt to surprises like parts being dropped, boxes being moved, or unexpected obstacles to its work.

YouTube channel Neural Derp blends AI slop and stereotypes in the name of laughter. In this clip, titled Beam Me Up, Bubba, they imagine what Star Trek might have been like if it took place in a West Virginia trailer park. We still can’t get over Spock with a mullet and the Gorn playing the fiddle. Oh, there’s also a redneck version of The Next Generation.

Just a couple of years ago, the images that AI could generate were so obviously fake, with issues like extra fingers and garbled text. But the tech keeps improving, and it’s harder to spot. In this TED Talk, digital forensics expert Hany Farid explains some techniques professionals use to determine if an image is real, manipulated, or machine-generated.

Jacob Adler’s award-winning short film, Total Pixel Space, uses generative AI to explore the nature of images and the vast combinations of pixels and colors that produce visuals. While the possibilities may seem infinite, the math says there is a limit to the number of unique arrangements, at least when it comes to digital images of a given resolution. (Thanks, Rob!)

It’s unlikely that AI large language models like ChatGPT are self-aware. Still, Rootkid’s digital art installation, Latent Reflection, makes it seems like AI can contemplate its existence. He loaded a lightweight model onto a Raspberry Pi 4B mini computer, connected it to a custom-built display, and asked it to think about its reality, trapped inside of a computer circuit.

Michael McColl tapped into generative AI tools Kling and Midjourney to envision a cinematic view of how the Empire might have built its AT-AT walkers. While the video has its share of typical gen-AI weirdness, the concept is so compelling we wish it had made it into a real Star Wars film.

Please take a few minutes to look at this frenetic, surreal, dubstep-imbued film crafted by Meat Dept. using generative AI tech. A roundhouse salute to multiple genres of filmmaking, it balances pacing with a nostalgic color palette and a universal theme. Is the confusion a reflection of modern society (and the world of modern art)?

Simulating the movements of realistic characters in CGI can be a very processing-intensive task. Two Minute Papers shows us an innovative method developed by NVIDIA engineers that speeds things up by 100x or more. The trick is using a low-resolution model and interpolating the detailed features and movements using AI.

The internet and social media have been overrun with ads for non-existent and misrepresented products, and the advent of AI image generation has made things so much worse. YouTuber and scambuster Sambucha took one for the team and spent his hard-earned money to order some of these products to see exactly what you get when you order them.

Engineers from Apple Computer created an experimental robot that looks like a desk lamp but can interact with people and its environment in playful ways. Clearly inspired by Pixar’s classic Luxo Jr., the upgraded Anglepoise lamp uses AI tech to aim its beam at a subject and even nudge around small objects. Read the original research paper on Arxiv.

Over the years, there have been plenty of fun hacks involving Big Mouth Billy Bass. gptars rigged up his animatronic fish to converse using OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language model. His talking bass can listen and respond quickly, and does it using a snarky attitude and voice inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

AI voice assistants are designed to speak in languages that humans can understand. In this video, two AIs discover they’re speaking with another of their kind, then switch into their own special language. Gibberlink allows AIs to skip unnecessary speech synthesis and recognition and communicate using beeps and bleeps like R2D2 or a dial-up modem.